Vanderpump Rules Recap: Hubby Bubba

I’m just going to come out and say it: I hate Katie’s wedding dress. I’m not even talking about the boning or how she barely fits into it after 18 shots of Fireball the night before — I’m talking about the dress itself. There’s not one feature that’s hideous, but it’s a combination of factors that lead it to just look somewhat askew, like a Mr. Potato Head assembled incorrectly with the arms coming out of the eyeholes and an ear poking out where the nose should go.

The neckline is something between like a crew neck and boat neck and it dips down a little bit at the bust but not enough. There are both long sleeves and a long train (as there should be for a gown), but that seems like an odd choice for an outdoor wedding in the summer. The striping detail on the skirt is incongruous with the more detailed work up top. And what is up with the color? It’s sort of like it wants to be a nude illusion so it would look like Katie was just wrapped in a delicate layer of lace, which would be nice. But instead it just looks like a few old doilies hot glued onto a pair of old ladies’ dark panty hose in some sort of Project Runway challenge where they had to make a dress out of what they could find in an abandoned room at a retirement home.

The styling isn’t great, either. Katie’s makeup and hair are flawless, but they seem too traditional for this kind of funky bohemian dress out in the woods. And then there’s the long veil that’s dragging on the ground behind her, picking up pine needles like Jax Taylor collects pairs of used thongs on a weekend bender in Vegas. No, thank you.

That is most of the shit that I’m going to talk about this wedding. Well, there is that and the fact that there is a Taco Tuesday rehearsal dinner, which sounds like a cute idea. But then I realized that the reason more people don’t host a Taco Tuesday-themed rehearsal dinner is that no one in their right mind gets married on a Wednesday afternoon. I understand that the cast of this show doesn’t have real jobs, but imagine if you’re Tom Schwartz’s sister who has to work like a muggle? It’s no wonder she couldn’t make it. Friday night weddings are bad enough, but a Wednesday? That is just torture.

Sure, there are some other little things that we could pick on about the wedding, like how all the guys have their lapel pins on wrong so that the clasps stick out or how they wanted to leave that lectern just bald and ugly so Lisa could stand behind it looking like a Satanic priestess giving a lecture about the dark arts at a community college. Still, it seems like a really fun few days for everyone. The tubing trip looks nice, though the water is a bit low. The fishing expedition is just an excuse for Toms Schwartz and Sandoval to get all of their “pole” and “trouser snake” double entendres out before the wedding, but that is cute. And, shockingly enough, no one fights at all about anything. That’s like hosting a vegan convention and not having one person act superior.

Scheana Shay and her husband Shay Shay are doing something like fighting, but not really. Shay has just totally given up on this relationship by now, which is clear to anyone who even meets them in passing. Lisa Vanderpump totally clocks how badly things are going. When Scheana gives her that whole spiel about how the romance is back in their relationship, even the bunnies in the forest rolled their eyes and started a betting pool about how much longer this thing would last. Meanwhile, Shay does not want to be there at all. He wants to stay out of the action so much that his literal excuse for not going down to the Taco Tuesday night is that he wants to “lie by the fan.” That’s not even an excuse. That’s just some random words strung together that Scheana let him get away with.

Shay is the only person invited who’s a bit of a let down. Sure, the Schwartz triplets have a hard time getting there after they missed their flight, but once they arrived they were absolutely wonderful. (Missing their flight also gave us Jax sitting there for five minutes, trying to figure out if “more worse” was an actual thing, which, honestly, should be something that Betsy DeVos forces every charter school to screen for students.) Bert, Billy, and Brandon are everything that I imagined them to be. As I speculated, they have alliterative first names and they seem to share just about everything, including looking like they all just woke up at a shack in the swamp.

The great thing about the Triple B is that they are the most Florida thing imaginable. They are more Florida than getting eaten by an alligator in a sinkhole or being arrested having sex in public on bath salts. These guys have more pockets on their cargo shorts than they do ambition. They just want to crush beers and leer at girls, but never really get that far with any of them because they still share a bedroom with their parents. They have to borrow dress clothes from Sandoval and Jax — and even then, they can’t be bothered to tuck their shirts in. Jax has to make sure that they shower and wear clean socks because even the basics of hygiene seem like a bit of a stretch for them. Screw this Sweet Home Oklahoma show they’re trying to get us to watch on Bravo. I want The Three Bs or Not Three Bs.

Lisa is truly an asset throughout this episode, but I feel a little bit bad for the mothers of the bride and groom, who get a bit sidelined by the SUR matriarch. She gets to have tender moments with Katie and Tom, talking about the growth of their relationship, but also with Scheana and Stassi, with whom she finally divulged that she likes and respects Stassi a bit more than she lets on. I actually like Lisa way more on this show, where her sarcastic bitchy schtick is amusing. On Real Cooter Scratchers of Alene Too, she just pretends to be above it all and tries to keep that bitchiness under wraps. However, during that conversation with Scheana she also equates piñatas with animal abuse. I mean, seriously. That’s like equating masturbation with the University of South Carolina’s mascot because they both involve gamecocks.

When the ceremony came, I was surprised to feel myself tearing up a bit. I usually don’t cry at weddings and, no, they weren’t tears of sadness that my darling Schwartz is off the market forever. It was seeing these two people, a Bubba to each other, happy and making a commitment in front of all of their friends and families on a Wednesday. That and because I caught a glimpse of Schwartz’s ass in his tight tuxedo pants and remembered a night, long ago, in an alley somewhere in West Hollywood, where I had his back pressed up a corrugated iron fence as our chests rubbed together and our tongues probed at each other’s mouths. I slid my hand down his back and through the tight waistband of his jeans, thinking I wouldn’t be able to get my hand in there, until my wrist burst through and my palm was in the seat of his pants. All of the pressure was gone and I was rewarded with the bursting of a firm, slightly hairy man buttock in my grasp and I squeezed it ever so slightly, thinking that it would be mine forever, thinking that once you touch it you get to own it, thinking that the rest of eternity would feel just as warm and free.